


Second Opinion

by PlaidAdder



Category: Torchwood, WOF - Fandom
Genre: Crossover, Day in the Death, Gen, OFC - Freeform, not exactly major character death but one major character is already dead, post-Dead Man Walking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-10-15
Updated: 2015-11-04
Packaged: 2018-04-26 10:33:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5001385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>24 hours after Owen Harper's biological death, Martha Jones says he's in great shape. The team disagrees. Jack decides to get a second opinion. All hell breaks loose. Again.<br/>*****<br/>It begins during the gap between the end of "Dead Man Walking" and "A Day in the Death." Includes characters from my original fiction (Women On Fire).</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. OUT OF NETWORK

**24 HOURS AFTER**

The noise was deafening.

Of course whenever the portal opened, it was loud enough; but there was so much snarling, snapping, and shouting coming through the entrance that Ianto thought at first it was a mob of weevils. But no; not this time. It was Gwen and Owen, back from a routine call, and at each other's throats. Ianto looked up on itand saw Tosh at her station, looking down at the carnage unfolding. It was hard to know what she was thinking. Since Owen came back, Tosh's expression of pained concern and regret seemed to have become permanent.

"Nothing changes," Owen shouted, pushing Gwen away from him. "Everything's still always my fault!"

Gwen swung for him. Tosh let out a cry of alarm. Gwen heard it and pulled the punch, so that her hand barely grazed his cheek. She backed away, holding her hands up, saying, "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, Owen, I forgot you were--"

"Oh you forgot!" Owen shouted. "That's brilliant. Must be nice, forgetting. Wish I could forget. I never forget. Not for a moment. I'm a fucking elephant, I am."

"Please." Jack had emerged from his office and was looking on, shirtsleeves rolled up, arms folded. "Save the boasting for someone who hasn't seen it."

Gwen and Owen both rounded on him. He held up a hand, issuing his commands in his very coolest and hardest tone.

"Calm down, both of you, and tell me what happened."

Gwen, whose chest was still heaving with suppressed rage, swept her long dark hair back from her neck. From his vantage point, Ianto could see the tail ends of a set of long, corrugated, bloody furrows which had been dug along the right side of her neck by something's claws. Too close together to be a weevil. Jack grimaced, and sucked a hissing breath through his clenched teeth.

"He said he had me covered," Gwen shouted, stabbing an accusing finger at Owen, who rolled his eyes and looked up at the ceiling. "Well he didn't--"

"I did--" Owen interjected.

"--and now there's some kind of...space badger...loose in the botanical gardens--"

"There was a pair of them," Owen began, trying to sound calm but only succeeding in sounding bitter. "We only saw one at first, we didn't know it had a mate. I _did_ have her covered--"

"He wasn't paying attention," Gwen insisted. "Not properly, and now I've a fitting to go to and I look like the bride of Freddy bloody Kruger. It was a routine--"

"Nothing's routine!" Owen shouted. "Not in this job, not ever. Are you a fucking child? Accidents happen. Guns go off. If there's a--badger--out there with your name on it, what can I do about it? I mean you didn't take that bullet for me, did you? None of you did."

Tosh gave out a squeak of pain and sorrow. Martha's mouth dropped open. Even Jack was startled into momentary silence.

Then Jack said, quietly, "Gwen? Are you all right?"

Ianto began moving. So did Martha. Because Gwen clearly was not all right. She was shaking all over. Not with rage; with shock.

"Oh my God," Tosh said, moving toward the stairs.

Martha and Jack caught Gwen as she fell. They began carrying her toward the hospital bed. Owen started to follow them. As Martha began easing her onto the bed, Jack turned around, standing up to block Owen's path.

"Let me--" Owen began.

"Sit down," Jack said.

"But I'm--"

"A doctor," Jack spat at him. "Oh, you remember now. Sit down, elephant. Martha's got it covered."

In fact, Martha had already fixed up a huge syringe full of petalumine and was stabbing the oversized needle straight into Gwen's chest cavity. She pressed the plunger, removed the needle, and turned Gwen's head to the side. When Gwen's eyes fluttered open, she was looking at Jack, who was still fuming.

"Oh God, is it that bad?" Gwen said, in a small and frightened voice.

Jack smiled. "Course not. Look out though, this stuff stings."

Martha began painting petalumine onto Gwen's disinfected neck wounds. She let out one screech, then gritted her teeth.

Ianto was never in a hurry to take his eyes off Jack. But it did occur to him to wonder where Owen was. He had not obeyed Jack's order. He was still standing, his hands dangling by his side, staring...well. Possibly at the sight of Martha Jones expertly coaxing his ex-lover back from the brink of death. Possibly at Tosh, standing by her wounded comrade, trying very hard not to throw any wounded looks in Owen's direction. But possibly, Ianto thought even probably, Owen was staring at nothing at all.

*  *   *   *  * 

"Gwen. Toshiko. Ianto. Conference room. Now, please."

Owen, who was being examined by Martha, made a show of not looking round. Gwen, one hand touching her newly-bandaged neck, was the first to move. Toshiko didn't jump right away, as she usually did. She was too busy looking at Owen and thinking, _so that's why he doesn't believe me_. Because I wasn't there to take the bullet for him.

In the conference room, Toshiko put her elbows on the table, then put her head in her hands. She didn't care what they would think. She was tired. It was exhausting, keeping all the images at bay. Owen on the autopsy table. Owen's look of shock as she told him she loved him. Owen's eyes becoming dark matter, black holes from which death would come hissing out. Owen finally kissing her, and then before she had time to get over the shock, locking her out while he battled with Death Itself.

Jack strode in, put his hands on the table, leaned over it, and barked at them.

"Obviously something needs to be done about Owen. I'm taking suggestions."

"You could fire him again," Ianto offered.

Tosh was about to hiss at him; but Jack got there first.

"Not funny. Anyway we can't retcon him now; and besides, he wouldn't last a day in the outside world."

It struck Tosh that Jack was talking about Owen as if he were some sort of wild animal that Jack had personally domesticated. Like a kind of pet weevil.

"We should have Martha examine him," Toshiko said, quickly. "See if there's something--"

"Tosh, he's dead," Gwen put in.

"So?" Toshiko shot back.

Gwen was leaning back in her chair; and she was quiet for the moment, but there was clearly a storm brewing.

"So he's beyond doctors," Gwen said. "It'd make more sense to send for a priest."

Jack suddenly stood up. Toshiko could see him thinking. It didn't make her feel better.

"I...don't think Owen believes in God," Toshiko said, tentatively.

Jack sank slowly into his chair, still thinking.

"No more do I," Gwen answered. "I just meant..."

Jack took a deep breath. Toshiko recognized the look on his face immediately. It was the look that said,  _I am about to tell you something that will make all of you very, very angry._

"Jack," Ianto said, warily. Of course Ianto must recognize the look too. Probably he saw it more often than any of them. 

"You remember I told Martha we have no idea where the gloves came from," Jack said, slowly.

"Oh no," Ianto murmured.

"You know," Gwen snapped. "You know, and you've been lying to us all this--"

"I wasn't--it's true that I don't know who made them and I don't really know how they work. But they didn't just...come through the rift. Well, not in the usual way."

There was a long silence.

"What's the _unusual_ way?" Ianto finally prompted. For a soft-spoken man, he could make his voice cutting when he cared to.

"I brought them," Jack said, rushing now to get the revelation over with. "I was in...another universe...and I had to leave in kind of a hurry...and I took them with me."

"You stole them," Ianto corrected.

"Yes," Jack conceded. "Yes. I stole them."

" _From whom_ did you steal them?" Ianto pressed.

Jack's eyes got that faraway look. He was almost smiling when he finally responded. 

"It doesn't matter," Jack said. And then, as he realized none of them were buying  _that_ , he rushed on. "All right, it does matter, but I'm not going to tell you. Anyway we can't talk to her. But we can talk to someone else who knows what these things are and how she made them. I know exactly who to call, but I'm going to have to go into the rift for her."

Toshiko gasped. 

" _Into_ the rift?"

Jack nodded. He was elated, as he often was when he discussed plans that involved calamitous risk and certain death.

"I'm going to need you to do some pretty funky calculations for this trip, Toshiko."

"I--you want to go INTO the rift?" Toshiko demanded, a bit more loudly this time.

"I've done it before," Jack said. "There and back again. I have a vortex manipulator, as long as you can crunch the numbers I should get there and back with no trouble. Gwen, why don't you take the rest of the day off. Ianto, come to my office, there's some things we're going to have to clean up before she gets here."

Ianto stood up; so did Gwen. Toshiko was the only one left in her seat, staring in shock at her stark raving mad team leader.

"Like what things?" Ianto said, deferential again now, as the two of them passed out of the conference room together.

"Blood, mainly," Jack said. "Also, any bits and pieces of aliens you find lying around, tidy them away. We should also switch everything we can to power-saving mode. She's going to need a per diem but you can't pay her in cash, it has to be vouchers or something..."

Toshiko let their voices die away. Gwen was still standing, but looking over at her with great concern.

"He wants to go  _into_ the rift," Toshiko whispered.

Gwen registered the insanity of it. 

"If it'll help Owen," she finally said. "Anyway, it won't kill him."

No. It wouldn't kill him. Worst case scenario, Jack would be lost. Forever.

*   *   *  *

Jack had experienced most of the methods of death available to most humans in most time periods. Some were more painful than others; but nothing was nastier than drowning. The feeling of water in your lungs was just so...disgusting...it never lost its wrongness. And the suffocation. For some reason suffocation was especially terrifying. 

Maybe the rift was sentient. Maybe that's why, despite the care with which Toshiko had done all those funky calculations, it spat him out into what appeared to be the bottom of a river. A river with quite a strong current. He finally stopped moving when his coat caught on a tangle of tree roots. It was a tough choice whether to accept the drowning or lose the coat. In the end, he struggled out of it. The boots had to go too; without them he couldn't kick hard enough to turn his body perpendicular to the current. 

It was a wide river. Wide enough that the trousers went too, suspenders attached, as he struggled toward the shore. At that point, Jack decided that nakedness was both more practical and more dignified. Nothing seemed sadder to him at that moment than being found on the riverbank in nothing but a bedraggled cotton shirt.

When he came to, he was blinking up at the sun. He was on his back. And he was STILL not out of the fucking river. He was merely floating along on top of it.

Cursing inside, Jack flipped over and began stroking toward the nearest bank. It all came back to him, the crawl, and he found himself enjoying it. There was always that first flush of vitality after coming back, as if every one of his blood cells had been refreshed.

At last he reached the shallows. He planted his feet in the soft silt, gratefully, and began climbing out of the water, one unsteady step at a time.

It was a few moments before he realized that the shadow blocking the sun was not a natural rock formation. It was in fact a crowd of people, ranged on a series of graduated platforms. They were all wearing red, for some reason. Men and women, all of them light-skinned though many of them were tanned. Young and old, their bodies mostly concealed by some of the baggiest, most poorly designed garments he'd ever encountered on an alien world. But here and there you saw a face of startling beauty. They all had their mouths open for some reason.

Ah yes. They were singing.

When the sound reached him, Jack stopped for a moment. He listened, the water lapping about his shins. He had no idea what the words meant and Tosh wasn't there to translate. But there was heartbreak in it. Heartbreak and hope. Death and joy. Layers of harmony that he recognized, pitches that brought water to his eyes, they were so achingly familiar.

The song stopped, all at once. He could now pick out, against the sea of red, a woman standing up with her back to the river. He assumed it was a woman because she was wearing what all their priestesses wore--a white robe wrapped around her stout body, pinned here and there with star-shaped brooches. And he must have, after all, found the right place. There couldn't be too many of them whose hair was that bright, that red, and that abundant.

He saw the woman bow to the crowd. And then he saw the crowd begin to notice him.

It is my superpower, after all, Jack thought. The ability to make any occasion ridiculous.

"Hello!" Jack shouted out, waving one arm above his head as he splashed through the shallows. He did his best to stand proud, though of course the water had been cold and there was little he could do about it. "Hi everyone! Lovely party you're having here. Sorry I'm underdressed. The invitation didn't specify, and I kind of default to 'clothing optional.' "

The woman in white turned around. Everyone gasped at the same time.

Jack finally stood on the dry sand. In the silence, water streamed from every part of his body, pattering onto the sand, darkening a circle around him.

"Shriia," he finally said, looking into her astonished face. "I need something."

Her eyes didn't drop even for a minute. She kept them fixed on his face, and finally said, "You mean apart from trousers."

Well at least someone at this party could take a joke.

"Yes," Jack said, with a laugh, as he moved toward her.

"What do you need?" said the woman in white.

"I need a second opinion," he said.

Before she could draw back, Jack shot out one hand and grabbed her by the wrist. With the other he punched madly away at the vortex manipulator.

"Get your thurking hands off--"

"This'll only take a minute."

What that crowd on the riverbank made of their vanishing into thin air, no one would ever know. Nobody in that universe ever remembered anything Jack did there, after he was gone. Well. Nobody except for one woman; and she couldn't possibly know he was there.

* * * * *

There are days, Ianto thought, that this job would break your heart and crush your soul. There are days when you do nothing but sit in that little gift shop and watching tourists stare at postcards. And then there are the days when God smiles on you and treats you to the glorious spectacle of Jack Harkness climbing out of the rift chamber, hair dripping wet, skin glistening, naked as the day he was born. Assuming he'd been born wearing a vortex manipulator.

"Everyone," he said, to the crowd that had gathered round. "I want you to meet..."

He turned to a woman who had come through just behind him. She was a largish woman, and she didn't look happy. No makeup. No trace of product in her disheveled red hair. Dress a disaster, shoes even worse.

Jack said, "Sorry, I know you told me your name but I can't pronounce it."

"I'm Theamh ni hUlnach," said the visitor, "and _you_  are the gleachinai who still hasn't told me who you are or where this is or how you dragged me here or why the thurking ETHER is IN your...house...or what you need."

"I like her already," Ianto said.

"That's Ianto," Jack said, waving a hand at him. "This is Gwen, that's Toshiko, over here is Doctor Martha Jones--"

"Oh," said the visitor. 

Martha looked back at her. "What?"

"Nothing," said the visitor. "I'm sorry, it's nothing. I thought for a moment you were a friend of mine. Obviously you're not. Obviously. Stupid of me. Sorry."

Something very awkward going on there, Ianto thought, but damned if I know--

"And this," said Jack, waving toward him as if he were some sort of prize about to be awarded, "is Owen Harper."

The visitor's jaw didn't actually drop. But she was quite obviously startled.

"He's dead," Jack said. 

"Well that would explain a lot," said the visitor.

She wasn't afraid, Ianto thought. More like...intrigued.

"Can you do anything for him?" Jack finally said.

Owen let out a noise of annoyance. "Honestly, Jack, I don't need any...life coaching from some fat nun in a bedsheet."

"Owen!" Toshiko gasped.

The visitor held up one hand. Somehow everyone knew this meant silence. Even Owen, who did not look sorry at all.

"Put on some trousers," she said to Jack, "and I'll take the case." 

She was not smiling at all. Her voice was discouraging, even harsh. And yet somehow, everyone in the room--everyone alive, at any rate--began to feel a little better.

END CHAPTER ONE

 


	2. THE FIRST CUT

Despite the fact that being examined by a...witch, or priestess, or whatever...did not involve needles or magnetic resonance imaging, Owen found it unpleasant. All the visitor did was put a hand around the back of his head, near the nape, right at the spot where Jack usually grabbed him just before or just after Owen did something insubordinate, dangerous, or stupid. During their chat in that sodding jail cell, Jack had touched him there; and it had been chilling to realize that he wasn't feeling that little tingle that Jack's touch usually sparked. He'd experienced Jack's hand on his neck purely as a set of spatial relations--at most a dull sensation of pressure. It wasn't something he'd thought he would ever miss--being handled by Jack.

Looking into the visitor's face, Owen suddenly realized why he was finding all this so uncomfortable. It was because he  _could_ feel her touch. It wasn't tingling, exactly. More like a kind of itch, as if a host of tiny insects were scurrying across his scalp, racing along the furrows of his hair. He tried to stop thinking about it and focus on the visitor's face--which wasn't bad, really. Most attractive part of her. Clear skin, large bright eyes, soft mouth, eyebrows out of control of course but he could see why she might keep them natural. Look, they said, real ginger, this didn't come out of a bottle. But, Owen noticed for the first time, her color was not good. She looked very pale. And come to think of it there was sweat beading up at her hairline, trickling down her forehead into those eyebrows. 

"How much longer is this going to take?" Owen demanded.

The visitor's eyebrows moved closer together. She frowned at him for a while, and then suddenly dropped her hand. She took a step back, grasping her chin in one largish hand, thinking about something that evidently wasn't very cheerful.

"Find anything?" Jack said. He'd put on some clothes at last and was watching from over by the window into his office, blue shirtsleeves rolled up, suspenders in full view. Ianto had evidently buggered off--probably in search of a new coat for Jack. Gwen and Tosh were sitting together on the couch, staring wide-eyed like two girls listening to ghost stories at a slumber party. The only relief Owen could find anywhere in this room was the sight of Martha's beautiful face, enhanced by its beautiful expression of utter skepticism.

"Well, he's been possessed by another being within the past twenty-four hours," said the visitor. "But I'm assuming you knew that already."

"It'd have been hard to miss," Owen said.

The visitor's mouth twitched up at the corners, just a bit. "Yeah, nobody's ever accused a durok of being subtle. It was a durok, right? I'm almost sure it was a durok, but we don't really see them very often, so it's hard to be certain--"

Owen broke in. "That's--that's what it was." If only his body weren't dead, it would have shuddered at the memory. "Durok. Hunger."

She seemed delighted to hear it. 

"Oh, the duroks," she said, and her voice was suddenly lighter, almost playful. "Poor bastards." But at that moment she happened to look at Gwen's face, and instantly became solemn again. "I mean it's not funny, of course not, they are death-eaters after all, and it's a terrible experience for the gateway body, no wonder he's in the shape he's in. But it is just sad, all the posturing and the smoke and the boasting...did it say anything, before you banished it?"

Tosh said, in her very stiffest and most professional voice, "It said, 'I shall walk the earth, and my hunger shall know no bounds.' "

The visitor attempted to stifle a laugh. It leaked out through her compressed lips as a kind of hiccup.

"I don't see what's funny about it," Gwen said, in that dangerous tone of voice Owen knew so well. 

"I know, I'm sorry, it's just--you see--the duroks, they do all that just because they're so timid. The floating skeleton and the black smoke and the voice from the bowels of the earth and all that, they just do it to scare people out of resisting them. You know it's like they say in scoil: the more fright, the less fight. A durok is the only spirit I know of that actually cannot get out of a locked room once it materializes. And as long as you're not scared, you don't even need fire to send them home. Honestly, there are reports in the files of duroks leaving before the shriia even got there, just because some old grandmother sat up in bed and yelled at it. I mean that's why they go right for the old and the sick, you know. If it's a durok versus a healthy adult human who's too pissed off to be frightened, my money's on the human. Which is why I figure you must have been dead before the thing got into you."

She seemed surprised by the extremely tense silence that had fallen around her. Tosh was glaring at Gwen and Owen thought her mouth was probably forming the words, "Bloody Google." Gwen was looking daggers at Jack. Jack was staring pointedly at the visitor, brows lowered, eyes snapping.

"So what you're saying," Jack finally spat out, "is that we've been punked."

"If by that you mean played, had, cheated, set up, mindbested--" Jack's glare intensified; she cut herself off. "Then yes. I'm afraid so. Yes. But don't feel bad about it." The visitor's hands leapt into the air, as if to soothe everyone's invisible feelings. "We in the Order, you know, we have the benefit of hundreds of years of knowledge, we burn with the light of those who came before us. You all apparently don't have anything like scoil. Unless..."

The visitor looked around her at the tiled arches, the halogen lights, the glowing screens, the pterodactyl circling the shaft of the lift.

"Unless that's...what this place is?" she said.

Jack smiled. "In a manner of speaking," he said.

The shriia wiped her sleeve across the back of her forehead. Droplets of sweat scattered from the white wool as she dropped her arm.

"But he's clean now?" Jack said.

"I've been through his entire mindspace," said the visitor. "There's nothing in there."

"Oh good."

"No, not good. I mean--he's not just clean. He's empty. There's--and yet he's obviously--so it's not--but it shouldn't be--"

She broke off, staring at Owen in a way he didn't like at all.

"Let me just try one more thing," she said.

Owen groaned. "Jack, this is a complete waste of time." 

"I agree," Martha said, emphatically.

"Thank you," Owen replied, sincerely.

"Give her a minute," Jack said. "It won't hurt, will it, shriia?"

The visitor had taken a small drawstring pouch out of the gigantic shapeless bag she had deposited on top of a crate of weevil spray. She poured, with absurd care and attention, a small pile of very fine, iridescent dust from the bag to the palm of one hand.

"No," she answered, folding her hand into a fist around the dust, and pulling the strings of the pouch tight with her teeth.  

"You're going to cure me...with glitter," Owen said.

"Why not?" said Jack. "Be a good look for you. I always said you were built for glam rock."

"It's not glitter," said the visitor. "It's showdust. And it won't cure you."

"Then what the hell is it for?" shouted Owen.

The visitor's closed fist shot towards Owen. But there was no punch. Her hand opened, and a jet of white flame roared out of it, straight into his face.

"Whoa!" shouted Jack, leaping backward. Gwen and Tosh shrieked in unison. 

Owen couldn't dodge it. The flames slapped against his skin, stung for an instant, and then hissed out. Of course he couldn't feel heat any more, or pain; but he didn't smell burning either. He lifted one of his hands to touch his face. When he caught sight of his hand, he froze.

"Oh my God," he heard Gwen saying. "What--what's--"

That's our Gwen, Owen thought. Always articulate. 

Presumably Gwen meant to inquire why Owen's skin was glowing with a kind of acid-yellow light, bilious but bright. As he turned his hand over, he saw there were thin filaments of a bright pinkish color, somewhere between fuschia and magenta, weaving through the yellow, flickering along the lines on his palm. For a sickening instant he thought his skin was dissolving; but it was just the light, rippling around his hands, lapping and overlapping like the waves on the bay.

"Was this supposed to happen?" Owen demanded.

"Yes and no," said the visitor. She had her hands on her hips now and was frowning at him as if he'd done something wrong.

"Sweetheart, if you can't come up with a better answer, so help me--" Owen began, clenching his teeth.

"I mean I did sort of expect it," she interrupted. "Because you're not in there, and you had to be somewhere, and...well, I didn't know you while you were alive, but assuming there hasn't been a  _huge_ personality change, I'm pretty sure the colors are right." She appealed to Tosh and Gwen on the couch. "Do they seem right to you? I mean right for Owen?"

Tosh blinked. "For Owen's what?"

"For Owen," the visitor repeated, impatiently. "If you were to imagine Owen as a color, is this more or less what he would look like?"

Tosh paused. Then she gave that irritating little nod.

"Yes actually," she said. "I can see it."

Gwen gave it a moment's thought, then nodded.

"So the dust shows up his aura," Jack said. "That's a pretty cool trick. Do you do it at parties? You know, when things get slow down at the scoil dances--"

"You don't understand," said the visitor. "That's  _not_ his aura. That's _him_. Showdust makes spirits visible. It doesn't normally make human spirits visible, though, because our spirits are blended up _with_ our bodies and not sort of oozing _around_ our bodies the way Owen's is right now. That's...I've never seen that happen. I wouldn't have thought it was possible. I mean this is just entirely wrong in every way, for a spirit to be...hanging around the body, like that. It's profoundly unnatural."

Owen said, "Thanks so much. You know, your bedside manner _stinks_."

"Oh, I know, it does!" the visitor exclaimed. She was genuinely excited to hear him say it, as if it he had just confirmed some argument she had long been trying to make. "I'm so bad at that part of it, it's awful, my diaoc was always getting after me about it. People want reassurance and I'm just not good at giving it to them. I mean it's hard for all of us, it's hard sometimes to be reassuring when you can't lie, but I'm especially hopeless. So--so just so you know," she said, faltering, "your spirit looks fine, it doesn't seem to have been corrupted or harmed at all."

It had never occurred to Owen to worry about any of that; but now she'd said it, he was sure to begin. That was all he needed. He'd been dwelling, obsessively enough, on everything that was wrong with his body; now all of a sudden he had to worry about the state of his soul.

"So," said the visitor. "Is anyone going to tell me exactly how Owen died, and how it happened that he isn't gone?"

Everyone looked at Jack.

Jack sighed. "Toshiko, would you show her the relevant security video? I want to talk to Owen."

"Of course." Good old Tosh, taking it seriously as she always did, moving in past him to reach the visitor, not even pausing to comment on the fact that Owen was still glowing like some sort of electric lemon. "Come with me, please."

The visitor nodded, and began climbing the stairs to the second level behind Tosh. 

"Oi!" Owen called out, raising his glowing hands. 

The visitor turned round, halfway up the stairs.

"Yes?" she said. 

"Turn off the lights before you leave the room!" Owen shouted.

It was a moment before she got it. "Oh...there's actually...there's no way to deactivate showdust once you've fired it. But don't worry, it'll lose potency eventually."

She turned around to climb the stairs. Owen stood gaping after her.

"Well, how long is  _that_ going to take?" Owen demanded.

She had gained the balcony now, and had her elbows on the railing, leaning over to watch the light show Owen continued to provide.

"Honestly, friend, I have no idea," she said, chagrined. "I'm sorry, but...you know, normally when you hit something with showdust, you better knock it back into the ether in the next five minutes, or else you won't be around to notice it when the showdust wears off. I mean the dust is material, if you could pass through a wall or something it'd detach and drop off, but you can't, so...we'll just have to wait and see. I'm sorry." 

Gwen was looking down at the floor, with one hand over her mouth. Because she was laughing. The bitch was laughing. They were all laughing at him. They'd been laughing at him for years.

"Fuck this," Owen shouted. "Fuck her," he said, stabbing a finger up at the visitor, "fuck Torchwood, fuck all of you."

"Owen," Jack barked, as Owen grabbed his leather jacket and headed toward the lift. "I want to talk to you."

"I don't care," Owen snapped. "You, Jack fucking Harkness, you and your fucking miracle can go and get yourselves  _especially_ fucked."

"You're still under quarantine," Jack said, as Owen put one foot on the lift.

"More to the point," said Martha, "you're still neon yellow."

Owen swung around. A growl like a weevil's had begun in his throat. It burst into the air, where it turned, unexpectedly, into a scream.

It was a long scream. It seemed to be rising, not from within his body, but from the little yellow and magenta flames that made up its fiery sheath. He could not say it felt good. But it felt like...something.

He heard Jack muttering something angry, but as if from a long way off. And he knew that his body was buckling, that Jack had grabbed him or punched him or who knows, tossed him over Jack's shoulder, but at any rate his feet weren't on the ground any more and he was moving.

When the scream stopped, he was sitting in a chair in Jack's office. Jack was behind his desk, hands folded, waiting.

"Finished now?" Jack said.

Owen raised a shaky hand to his face. His skin had gone back to normal. Well, the new normal. Room temperature, pallid, clammy.

"Apparently," Owen muttered.

Jack leaned over the desk.

"So that call with Gwen," he said. "What happened?"

"Christ, Jack. Are you still back on that? I've just seen my own soul in living technicolor, I'm not concerned any more about some fucking scratches. She lived, didn't she?"

"You don't know what happened, do you," Jack said, as if Owen hadn't even spoken. "You don't know why you didn't get it in time. You're as upset about it as Gwen is, but you don't know what you did wrong. Well I do."

Bloody Jack. You could never get the jump on him. Acted like the biggest narcissist on the planet and then you'd find out all of a sudden one day that all the time he'd been watching, that he knew you better than you did.

"So tell me, wise one," Owen said. "What did I do wrong?"

"It's your reflexes," Jack said. "I was watching when she fired the showdust at you. You didn't block, you didn't duck, you didn't even flinch. When you--when you were alive--you were always steaming with adrenaline. All your nerves on red alert. It was beautiful, all that pent-up energy, the way you could just explode out of nothing, the way you turned on a dime."

The cold wind that seemed to be blowing through Owen all the time these days got a few degrees colder. It had never occurred to him. But of course Jack was right. No adrenaline. No reflexes. No animal inside him scenting danger. No urgency. Since he was already dead.

It was funny how there were all these new things yet to discover. Every tiny loss, adding to the crushing weight of this curse he'd been saddled with.

"You can't rely on that any more, Owen," Jack said. "You're going to have to retrain yourself completely. You'll have to...learn some other way of sensing danger. Some other way to stay on edge."

Owen stared at Jack. It felt as if Jack had told him to grow a pair of wings. As if he had told Owen that it would all be fine just as soon as he turned himself into a pencil sharpener and then ran a marathon.

I can't, Owen thought. I can't, I can't, I can't.

He had no tears. There was no lump in his throat. His lungs wouldn't spasm, there were no gasps coming, no sobs. Just this voice in his head saying, I can't do this, I can't, I can't, I can't.

No tears for Owen, he thought, as he watched the water well up in Jack's eyes. But it looks like Jack brought enough for the both of us.

*   *   *   *   *

"You don't look well, Jack," said Ianto.

Jack lifted his head from where he'd laid it down on the desk. He blinked up at Ianto, who--as always--looked fresh as a daisy. That was perhaps the most beautiful thing about him. All that horror with Lisa, with Suzie, with everyone else...and he might break a sweat or shed a tear in the throes of crisis, but after it was all over he'd clear it up and tidy it away and file the paperwork and when Jack came and found him afterward, Ianto would always greet him with a mood as freshly soaped, lotioned, and scented as his face. No point in dwelling, Ianto had said once. Live for the moment, it's all you can do. Maybe after Lisa, it was the only way for him to go on. No more dragging your dead behind you, bound with chains of unconsolable grief. Make every bite at that apple your first, no matter how close to the core you actually are.

"I've been talking to Owen," Jack said, slumping back wearily in his chair, rubbing his face with his hands. "I mean it wasn't much like talking, really, not what you'd call a real give and take."

"I brought you coffee," Ianto said, setting the tray down on the desk.

The scent of it seemed to be recalling Jack to life. "Sure you don't have anything stronger?"

Just as Ianto was about to reply, there was a rapid banging on the door to his office. 

He sighed, and got up.

It was Theamh. Of course. And she looked ready for battle. Jack sighed. It wasn't that he hadn't expected this moment all along; but he felt curiously unable to cope at this particular moment.

"T-bone! Come on in," Jack called out, giving her a pat on the shoulder as she walked in. He knew shriias hated to be touched. All Ideirens did. The women there, some of them would just take your hand right off if you weren't careful.

"T-bone?" Ianto murmured.

"I can't deal with...with Th..."

"With Theamh ni hUlnach?" Ianto asked, blandly.

"With all that," Jack agreed.

"You've been working in Cardiff for how long," Ianto said, mildly, "and you can't handle a name like Theamh ni hUlnach?"

"You see?" said Theamh, gesturing toward Ianto. "It's not that hard. None of your apprentices are having any trouble with it."

"I'm American," Jack said.

"You language game is weak, Jack," Ianto said, shaking his head sadly. "Weak."

"Shriia," Jack cut in, acidly. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Where did you get them?" she demanded.

"I don't follow you," Jack said.

"The firebridge."

"The what?" Jack retorted.

"The gloves. Those two jointed metal gloves you've been using to pervert the boundary between life and death. How did they get here?"

Jack held up his hands in surrender. "I don't know."

He felt Ianto looking at him. Jack hoped Theamh wouldn't notice.

"Ianto," she said, turning to him. "How did they get here?"

Ianto shook his head. "Don't know either. Sorry."

Theamh's eyes narrowed slightly. Then she turned back to Jack.

"So you stole them," she said. "From?"

Jack let out a hiss of annoyance. Really, learning to mask was not hard. Right after he returned from his last visit, he'd designed a basic mindstrength tutorial and ordered them all to take it. Zero result. Nobody even downloaded it.

"It's not important," Jack said. 

Theamh glared at him. But she was evidently not able to penetrate his mask.

"You can travel through time as well as the ether, evidently," Theamh said.

"Ianto!" Jack barked.

"I'm sorry, Jack, I'm not doing it on purpose."

"The legend of the firebridge has been around for two kyelrans. If you're not going to tell me  _who_ you stole them from,can you at least tell me  _when?_ " _  
_

"Would knowing that help you treat Owen?" Jack replied.

Theamh fumed in silence for a moment.

"Probably not," she answered.

"Then no."

Theamh let out an aggravated breath. 

"Speaking of Owen," Jack said. "Do you have a diagnosis?"

It was the smartest thing he could have said. Once she remembered she had a patient to save, she forgot all about everything else. Her sleeves began dancing as her hands came out to talk him through it.

"It's the connection," Theamh said. "The connection's been damaged. Possibly irreparably. That's why his spirit isn't fixed within his body."

"What connection?" Jack said.

He saw an expression on Theamh's face very similar to the one on Tosh's face when she asked her what 'video' meant.

"All right, so..." Theamh began, with just a bit of a sigh. "We believe that life begins when a connection forms between a new body and a spirit. But it's not like...like turning on the power, you know, in one of those horrible machines you have. Growing that connection takes all nine months and more. We don't even name our children until they're a year old, because we don't know till then that the connection's really taken. Now dying's a lot faster. But it's still not instantaneous. The connection is elastic, it's malleable to a certain extent. It'll stretch enough to let you leave your body for a short time. Otherwise we wouldn't be able to go into the ether, dark users wouldn't be able to possess people. When the body dies, the connection begins to snap." She twined her fingers together. "It's not a single wire, it's more like a cable, with strands connected to every part of your body. All the little strands snap, snap, snap, as death begins to spread through you. Sometimes a spirit can be still connected by one or two threads, even after the heart's stopped and there's no breath. That's why we watch people out. Partly to make sure nothing attacks them, you know, newly released spirits are vulnerable to predation. But partly just to make sure that all the cords have been cut, before we burn the body."

If Ianto thought any of this was insane, he wasn't showing it.

"That's why the first glove you had only worked on the recently dead," Theamh went on. "There still had to be at least one thread attached. And that's maybe also why it didn't work for long. Because you can't dangle an ox from a thread for very long before it breaks."

"So the gloves really are different?" was Jack's only response.

"Of course they're different," Theamh snapped. "Don't you know the legend? Don't you have any idea what you've been thurking with?"

"No," Jack said, and he was surprised by how meek it sounded. "I don't know the legend."

"Name of the Spirit," Theamh muttered. "Look, I haven't the energy to go through it at the moment, but the point is that those gloves were made by two different people and they were not forged in the same fire, if you take my meaning."

Jack did actually take her meaning, and found it unexpectedly alarming.

"The second glove evidently used some other means, undoubtedly dark and undoubtedly magical, to just...just  _stamp_ Owen's spirit back onto his body. It's not really  _connected_ to him. It's as if...as if it's been bonded to his skin, somehow. And because the spirit and the flesh are still in...some kind of contact...the death can't progress. He can't finish dying until his body and his spirit have separated. And they can't. Because somehow, that glove just...soldered them together. Artificially."

"Is that why his body's not decomposing?" Jack said. Ianto made a noise of disgust in the background.

"Probably," Theamh said. "Decay doesn't begin until life is over. Life isn't over until death is complete. Death will never be complete until flesh and spirit are parted."

"Can you...bring him back to life?" Jack said, afraid of the answer.

"I won't know till I've tried," said Theamh. "But all of my training is telling me no. Idair gives life. We can't."

"Then...what can we do?" Jack said. 

He hoped Ianto wouldn't take the plaintive note in his voice personally. Owen was the only person on the planet--in the universe, really--of whom Ianto was actually jealous. He'd hear it, of course: the regret for the beauty that had passed out of Owen along with the breath of life, for the vitality that once enlivened that angry, hurt, restless body. Doesn't make you any less, Ianto, he thought, as if Ianto could actually read him. It doesn't take anything away from you.

Theamh took a deep breath.

"You're the one who accosted me," she said. "You're also Owen's diaoc, I can see that. But with all respect, Aiv, Owen is the client. It's Owen's spirit at stake here; and Owen is the one I'm going to have that conversation with. Preferably somewhere else."

Jack nodded. "I can turn off the security cameras in--"

"No," Theamh said. "I don't mean in private, I mean somewhere else. Somewhere  _outside._ " She took a labored breath. "I am trying to hold it together down here, I really am. But I think I have spent about as much time as I can spend inside a subterranean hole filled with three hundred distinct varieties of fire, all of them potentially deadly and most of them barely contained. I need to get out of here. At least for a while."

Ianto coughed. Theamh turned toward him. He was holding up a garment bag.

"Your clothes," he said, deferentially. "Jack says you're not allowed to wear your hreapa in public."

Theamh smiled. "Thank you, Ianto. You're undervalued here."

"I know," Ianto replied, handing her the bag.

"All right then," Jack said. "Follow me."

In the main hub, Owen was having a very intense head-to-head with Martha over the examination table. Tosh was venting to Gwen about something, up by the railings. Jack called out, "All right, everyone, rule number one, shriias accept neither cash nor credit nor sexual favors. The only way to pay a shriia her work is to feed her. Owen."

Owen's head snapped around. His eyes were red-rimmed and narrow.

"Take our guest out for dinner. Someplace vegetarian. Not a bar."

Owen let out a noise of protest. "No. No, Jack. Really, no. Even if I am dead, I've still got better things to do--"

"She's here to help you, Owen--" Jack interrupted.

"Well I didn't invite her!" Owen cried. "It's not my job, anyway. Make Ianto do it--or Gwen, why not, she's a woman."

That embarrassed silence that so often fell nowadays after things Owen said enveloped them all. All except for Theamh, who folded the garment bag over one arm, and looked at Owen as if she were only now, for the first time, beginning to feel at home.

"That was amazing," Theamh said.

"What was?" Owen retorted.

"The way you managed to use a single sentence to hurt and insult every single person in this room."

Jack folded his arms and settled in to watch. Owen had nothing to say, at the moment.

"It was nothing short of brilliant," Theamh said. "Of course you got to all the women at once, by implying that it's only women who are unimportant enough to be stuck with this kind of tedious hospitality work. But that doesn't take any special talent. No, what I admire is the way you personalized it. It's like one of those Amstian knives with fifteen tiny little blades that just keep unfolding, and every one of them meant for a different friend. You wounded Ianto by implying that Jack owns him just because they're lovers, and of course that this makes him so much  _like_ a woman that he's the natural choice for chores like this. You hurt Gwen by dismissing her as  _just_ a woman, by which you mean just a collection of nurturing characteristics whose only function is to make people feel better, made just that little bit more painful by the way you've rejected all her attempts to care for _you--_ and the brilliant bit, the part I think really shows the most  _technical_ proficiency, is the way that by naming Gwen you also wounded Tosh by implying that she's  _not_ a woman, by which in this case you mean someone you want to thurk. And of course Jack is just laid open from neck to heels because he's gone to great trouble to bring me here to help you and it hurts him to see you making it impossible. And of course none of it's very flattering to me, but since I already know you've no great interest in spending an hour or two with a fat nun in a bedsheet, that's really neither here nor there."

Jack could hear the power humming in the walls, it was so quiet now.

"Now words are my business," Theamh went on. "And I have known some people who are  _really_ good at doing harm with them. But you are right up there with the best of them, friend. It's the economy of it, that's what's amazing. The way you managed to compress into such a short string of simple words all the vulnerabilities that your closest friends have exposed to you over the years you've worked together."

Owen gave out a weak laugh. He was smirking, but he looked shaken.

"Do they not have sarcasm where you come from?" he finally said.

"Oh, we do," said Theamh, brightly. "We even have an Old Tongue word for it. It derives from a verb which means 'to smile at someone while stabbing him.' Which of course is exactly what I'm doing to you, right now," she went on, raising her voice slightly. "But I have to do that, for professional reasons, don't I? Because you need to respect me, and you're a surgeon, it's the most important thing in the world to you. And how can a surgeon respect anyone who's afraid to make that first incision?"

She folded her arms and leaned against the lift pillar, waiting.

"Well," Jack broke in, as the silence became unbearable. "I think that's worth a veggie panini, don't you?"

Owen closed his eyes. He sighed. He walked across the floor toward Theamh. He stopped just in front of her, as insolently as he could do it.

"Would you like to have dinner with me?" he said, in tones of inexpressible boredom.

"I would," she replied. "Just let me change out of my work clothes."

They all watched her head off under the arch into the darkness.

"I think he likes her," Martha said, in a stage whisper, to Gwen.

Owen glared at her. But he did not, Jack noticed, contradict her.

END CHAPTER TWO

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	3. OUTPATIENT CARE

"You're not eating," she said.

It had taken her long enough to notice. Owen had selected the most pedestrian vegetarian restaurant he could find--Sands of Something, maybe generic Mediterranean, he wasn't totally sure and he didn't really care--and as luck would have it, there was an all-you-can-eat buffet. It wasn't until after she'd scoffed down her second plateful of hummusy things that she took much of an interest in his side of the table. Fortunately Owen had never gone for the pita-and-dip range of cuisine. It was hard, he now realized, to remember what he'd been eating for the past two years, apart from Jubilee Pizza. But it did appear, now he thought about it, that his life since joining Torchwood was one long culinary wasteland. They were all running with the needle on "empty" and nobody cared about what kind of fuel they were shoving into their bottomless pits. Well, Gwen had started to care, since she got engaged. And come to think of it, Tosh was sort of quietly picky about things. She never complained about what was offered; she'd just eat her two bites and then drift back to her station, where he'd sometimes catch her later on furtively snatching things with chopsticks out of a little green lacquered box she brought in with her. Not Owen Harper, though. Full to bursting with information about the importance of nutrition, and he'd gone on just shoving pizza and beer down his gullet for five years. It was quite a sharp pang to realize that he had wasted not just his last meal, but his last thousand.

"Of course," she went on, putting down her loaded and half-consumed pita pocket. "Of course you're not. I'm sorry. It takes a bit of getting used to, your...condition."

"Tell me about it," Owen bit off.

"Well," she replied, wiping her hands with a paper napkin. "You're not serious, of course; but if you want, I can actually tell you about it, or at least as much as I know about it."

She leaned out into the aisle to signal to the server. "Excuse me," she said, when he finally gloomed into view. "Could I have a box for the rest of this, please?"

The server said, "We don't do takeaway boxes for the buffet." She looked up at him. "Because it's all you can eat."

"Oh," she said. For a moment she looked unaccountably sad. "Well, could you clear it away for me, in that case, friend? I'm finished with it."

The server picked up her plate, turned on his heel, and went. She drank some more water. He wondered why she had sent her plate back when she was obviously still hungry. Then he realized she'd done it for him. So he wouldn't have to see and smell food he couldn't eat.

"There's one thing about this I don't understand," he said.

"Let's hope it's one of the few things I do," she replied, cheerfully.

"I can see. I can hear. I can speak. But I can't breathe. I can't really feel anything I touch, and everything tastes like ash. I don't understand why my eyes and ears and voice and muscles still work when everything else has shut down."

"They don't," she said.

He grinned at her. "I think they do. I'm talking to you now, aren't I, sunshine?"

"They don't," she insisted. "Your body, at this point, is basically a puppet that your spirit is manipulating in order to interact with the material world. Some would say that's the basic human condition; but I've never been a Dichotomist and frankly I think your existence pretty much disproves that particular theory. You've still got all the physical parts you always had, and your spirit just moves them around. You can still suck in air and push it back out, and all the cords are still there in your throat, they still vibrate if they're strummed. But what you see isn't coming in through your eyes and what you hear doesn't go in through your ears. You're perceiving things with your spirit, the way we do when we go into the ether."

"If that were true, wouldn't my spirit perceive taste?"

"No," she said. "I can't really properly explain it. But we can see and hear things when we travel into the ether, even though we're out of our bodies. I've never tasted or smelled anything out there. I think it must be because light and sound aren't material."

"They are material," he said.

She waved both hands at him, warding him off. "Please, do not start with the particles and the waves. Darin has been over that with me a million times and it never sticks. Organic. Light and sound are not organic. Therefore they can be perceived without help from the living body. Is that good enough for you?"

"Who's Darin?"

She sighed. "He's my doctor. Well, he used to be my doctor. Now he's just my friend."

"You have doctors where you come from," Owen noted, with surprise.

"A few," she said. "They're from over the border. Most shriias have never been to a doctor. We and the medicals generally don't get along."

"I can't imagine why," Owen muttered.

"You asked. I'm answering, the only way I know how. You can decide whether I'm making more sense or less sense than what Doctor Jones has been telling you."

Owen leaned back and considered the woman opposite him. Ianto had failed to work his usual magic this time; she was wearing an oversized men's work shirt and a pair of jeans that had seen better days. He wondered suddenly if Ianto had raided Rhys's closet for them. But her face was starting to make some sense to him now. He could see a light in her eyes that was not totally dissimilar to the light you could see in Martha's eyes sometimes when she was examining him. He still hoped, when he saw that light, that it meant romance. But now he could see it was just curiosity. And intelligence. Give her her due. 

"So, Doctor," he said, just to see her wince. "What's my prognosis?"

There was a slight tightening of the muscles around her jaw.

"Don't lie to me," he said.

"I can't," she answered.

"Then tell me." He let out a bitter laugh. "I'm dead already, how much worse can it get?"

She sat up a bit straighter, and put her hands down on the plastic surface of the table.

"If a connection is damaged from the psychic end, by possession or by some other...horrible experience," she said, "I can work with that. I can try to repair it, and over time, it will usually regain its strength. But yours was damaged at the corporeal end. It's possible that there might have been one thread or two that never snapped. But when you died, all or nearly all of your spirit was cut loose from your body. We don't know how to fix that. No shriia's ever fully repaired a broken connection; and two kyelrans ago, we stopped trying."

"So there's nothing you can do?"

He saw her feeling his disappointment. He was surprised to feel it himself. He had been telling himself that this was all hocus pocus, magical thinking, mythology people made up because they didn't understand biology. But evidently some part of him had come to believe in it. Some part of him had begun to hope.

"I don't say that," she said. "But...you should know...a shriia will almost never tell you that something is impossible. But if what you really want is to go back to the kind of life you had before you were shot...that strikes me as _extremely_ unlikely."

Owen sat in silence for a moment to see how this felt.

In a way, she wasn't telling him anything he didn't know. The word "puppet" had made sense, for him, of a feeling he'd been unable to put a finger on. A kind of heaviness, a resistance that his limbs seemed to offer whenever he moved them; the way he forgot to blink unless he was looking at someone else. A tiny, infinitesimal delay in the movement of his hand; a millisecond's halt in his step. It didn't seem like the thing he was moving around would ever have another impulse of its own.

But it hurt all the same.

"So what's the good of you, then?" he demanded. "What  _can_ you and your magic powers do for me and my corpse?"

She took a deep breath. 

"The only good I think I'm likely to do you, right now," she said, "would be to set you free."

Owen blinked at her. 

"Does that mean what I think it means?"

"Yes," she said.

Right. They were telepathic. Or so Jack said.

He considered his options for snappy comebacks. While he was considering them, he was startled to hear his own voice crying out, "I don't want that."

"All right," she said. "Why not?"

"Why do you _think_?" His voice was no longer under control. She didn't seem embarrassed by the people looking over at them. He found he also didn't care. He was dying here. He was dead already. And they didn't care about that. Not any of them.

"You're trapped right now in a very uncomfortable place. You're deeply unhappy there."

"What do you know about how I feel?" he shouted.

She lunged forward over the table, firing her words right at him.

"You are literally wearing your spirit on your sleeve, Owen, I know more than you think you're letting on. I'm sure your friends are picking it up too, they just don't realize it. You have the worst of everything now. You can't enjoy being in the material world and yet you're still not free of it. Now I'm not  _sure_ that I can do this, Owen, but I think it's possible, maybe even likely, that I could let you go. I could undo whatever...this is...and your spirit could depart."

"Depart," Owen snapped. "Listen to you. Departed, passed on, gone to a better place. There IS no better place! This is ALL there is! I know!"

He thought from the look on her face that he might have literally stunned her.

"But that's clearly not true," she said. 

"I've been there, there's nothing, that's what everyone says when they come back. There's nothing, there's nothing, it just goes black!"

"Owen," she said, sharply. "You were killed. Your spirit left your body. Then it came back. In the meantime...where the hell do you think it went?"

"Nowhere!" he shouted. Crying was another thing he'd thought he'd never miss. But not crying at a time like this was actually ten times more painful. No release, just pressure building and building and building.

"You don't remember where it went," she said, stabbing a finger at him. "You think there's nothing else because you don't remember anything else. Well if there were nowhere for an unhoused spirit to be, it would just disappear, wouldn't it? It would just--vanish. It would go to utina. Which--all right, utina is nothing, it's un-being. If your spirit goes to utina it doesn't come back. Your spirit didn't vanish. It's still here. So it it was never in utina. And since it wasn't in your body either, then _where did it come back from?"_

"Maybe it was just...floating about..." He ran his hands through his hair. It maddened him that he couldn't feel the texture. 

"In the air above you? No." She slapped her pointing hand down on the table. "Listen to me, Owen mac Harper, I do this for a living and I am at _least_ as good at my job as you are at yours. That you don't remember where you went while your body was dead means nothing. Nothing at all. Do you remember being in your mother's womb?"

"Oh for Christ's sake," Owen retorted. "No, but I know I was there, I have the ultrasounds, there is actual material evidence of the nine months I spent--"

"And you've forgotten it all the same," she said. "I talk to notborns in people's wombs all the time, it's quite educational, they're not easy to understand but it's amazing what they know, and when they're born, they forget it all. They've crossed through a door that only opens once and they can't take any of it with them. Everything we know about death tells us it's a lot like birth. You crossed over, yes, damn it, you crossed over, that's not just tarbhfnaa people make up, and you were never supposed to come back. Well, dark magic dragged you back here, but you still had to cross the threshold and you still had to leave behind whatever you found there. I don't know where we go when we die, Owen, none of us do, because nobody can take that knowledge back across the threshold. But I know we go  _somewhere._ And I believe that where we go to is better than  _this_ awful place."

Tears burst out of her quite suddenly. She seemed as surprised as he was. And, for the first time since he'd met her, embarrassed. She picked up a paper napkin and began wiping them away. Then she blew her nose in it. 

"I'm sorry," she said, while he stared at her in shocked silence. "This is not supposed to be about me. I'm sorry."

"Forget it," he finally said.

There was a long silence while she tried to control her breathing, and Owen wished he could still breathe.

"I know Captain doesn't want you to go," she finally said. "My diaoc would feel the same, I'm sure, in his position. But it's not his spirit. It's yours. You decide."

To let all go. To just walk away. Well. Float.

"If you don't...set me free," Owen said, slowly, "what will happen?"

"You'll go on as you are," she said, in a voice that was slightly hoarse. "Your spirit is immortal, as far as we can tell, it could last forever. Your body won't decay, but it is material and it will eventually disintegrate, wear away from friction or erosion if for no other reason. So you will be parted at last, but it could take a hundred years. You will be very vulnerable to possession," she said. "Like what happened with the durok. Your mindspace is totally empty now; anything could get in there, and do whatever it liked with your body. I suppose I could..." 

"Owen." 

Tosh's voice erupted over the comm. What a pity, he thought, that he could still hear that thing.

"Scuse me, Theamh," he said. "One second. Yeah, Tosh, what's up?"

"We've got a call from the Cardiff police," said Tosh. "They've found a murder, they think it might have been aliens, they want us to send someone round."

Bloody hell. "Who's the call from, Tosh?"

A hesitation. "From the constable who found--"

"Was it Andy, Tosh?"

He heard her sigh. "Yes, it was Andy."

Owen muttered a curse through gritted teeth. "Jesus, Tosh, I'm finally within shooting distance of enjoying myself, why do you have to come bother me with this shit? He's just after another date with Gwen at the public's expense."

"I know, I know." At least Andy had pissed Tosh off too. "But it does sound very strange, and--"

"So send--"

"There's nobody else," she cut in. "Gwen's off for drinks with the in-laws and anyway I'm not sending her, it'd only encourage him. Jack and Ianto are--busy--and I don't do postmortem examinations any more, Owen. Not after the Space Pig."

He sighed. Well, it was something to do, wasn't it.

"Give me the address," he said.

When he finally looked back over at Theamh, she was gone. 

It felt, somehow, as if he had been cut loose. As if a tether that had been keeping him anchored to this place had snapped. He found himself scanning the restaurant anxiously.

There she was. Over by the buffet, discreetly packing bhabha ghanouj into a plastic cup.

He got up. He stole across the room as stealthily as he could. He moved up behind her. Just as she was opening her bag to stuff her stolen booty into it, he clapped her on the shoulder.

"Well well well," he said. "What's all this then?"

It was so beautiful the way she spun around, and the look of panic on her face.

"It's a fair cop," he said.

She smiled, very briefly. Then, looking at his smug face, she laughed.

"Gleachinai," she said.

"If by that you mean arsehole, I cannot deny it," he said. "Got to go, I've got a call. Can you find your way back to the hub?"

She stared at him with that same delectable mixture of fear and anger.

"No," she said.

"Well come along with, then," he said, linking her arm. "I've watched you do your job, you watch me do mine. Then we'll talk about which of us is better at it."

She removed her arm from his elbow. But she did start walking alongside him.

"It's not for me, you know," she said.

"Right."

"It's for the vigils."

"Of course."

"It's TRUE!"

"I believe you."

"Gleachinai."

"Thief."

*  *  *  *  *

Toshiko sat staring at her screen for a few moments after Owen signed off, thinking about the fact that he had said the words _enjoying myself._

Good God, it was true. Tosh was actually the ONLY woman on the planet in which Owen Harper took no interest whatsoever.

It wasn't fair.

She felt a cry coming on. But fortunately, Jack bounded out of his office and stopped her.

"Toshiko!" he said, in that especially jubilant post-Ianto tone of voice. "Anything happen while I was out?"

You weren't out, she thought. What she said was, "A call came in from PC Andy. I sent Owen out."

"Probably nothing," Jack said.

"Probably."

He was still hovering there, eyeing her suspiciously. He hated the thought of missing anything important.

"What'd he tell you?"

Toshiko shrugged. "They found a body, a male, thirties, in his home, naked on his bed and covered in blood."

"Just another Saturday night," Jack said. 

"Yes. Except for the probable cause of death."

"Which was?"

"Someone stole his heart."

Jack peered more closely at her.

"Literally," Tosh went on, enjoying his evident surprise. "Someone went into his chest and took it. No tools, just punched through and grabbed it. Andy said he thought it was alien because nobody human is strong enough to--what are you doing?"

Jack had exploded. He was ripping around the hub, grabbing is coat, throwing it on, shoving guns into every pocket our pouch he was wearing anywhere on his body.

"It's all right, Jack, Owen's handling it," she said.

Jack pointed at her with a hand which eh had probably forgotten was holding a gun.

"It is  _not_ all right!" he shouted. "Next time anyone calls in a victim with that M. O. you give it directly to me, Toshiko, you understand?"

"I underst..." Toshiko began. But he wasn't listening. He was waiting impatiently for the portal to open, shouting into his comm.

"Owen. I want you to stop what you're doing and come back to the hub immediately. I will handle this call. I--no--Owen, are you still--Don't you cut me off, you skinny little son of a--OWEN!!"

The wheel cycled back. The portal closed. 

Ianto wandered nonchalantly out of the office.

"What did I miss?"

Toshiko looked at the closed portal and thought for a moment.

"If I were Sherlock Holmes," she said, "I think I might _deduce_...that whoever belonged to those gloves has come looking for them."

END CHAPTER

 


	4. OPEN-HEART SURGERY

Jack parked the SUV around the corner from the murder house. He might as well attempt to seize the advantage of surprise, though he couldn't believe it would actually work. When he rounded the corner, he could pick it out right away. She'd naturally chosen the closest thing she could find in Cardiff to a haunted castle: a big, ugly, Victorian townhouse, with black shingles and gray trim, tall and narrow and as grim as could be. Probably it had one of those wine-cellar basements, full of caves that went on forever.

It was the right address. But there was nobody there. No caution tape, no constables hanging around with coffee and walkie-talkies near the entrance, no onlookers. Nobody. 

He melted into the shadow of a nearby house and touched the comm. 

"Toshiko?" he murmured.

"Yes?"

"When you said 'call,' did you mean that you actually spoke to Andy, or did it come in electronically?"

"I spoke to him," Toshiko insisted. 

"Did he discover the scene himself?"

"I don't know. He didn't say."

"Would you call him now, please, and ask him who found the body?"

"Right away."

Jack waited, peering up the street at the forbidding facade. He wondered how long she'd been here. Did she own that pile? Was she subletting it from the current owners? Had she just let herself in one night and killed everyone she found there?

"Jack?" said Toshiko, in a flustered, high voice that boded no good. "Andy says he was relaying a request from the officers at the scene. But then--"

"Let me guess," Jack said. "When you asked who the officers at the scene were, he couldn't remember."

"That's what he says," Toshiko said, very aggrieved.  

"Fantastic," Jack replied. "Tell Andy it was a misunderstanding and it doesn't matter. Try to raise Owen and tell him under NO CIRCUMSTANCES is he to report to that address."

"Understood," Toshiko said. "Do you want me or Ianto to try to intercept--"

"NO!" Jack closed his eyes, repressed and image of Ianto on his back with a fist driving toward his chest, and said, "No, you both sit tight. I'll be back as soon as I can."

"Jack, what's going on?" Toshiko asked.

"I'll let you know when I've figured it out," Jack said.

He began stalking through the shadows toward the house. He had no idea now what he was going to find there. Maybe there'd been a murder in that house; maybe there hadn't. Maybe there'd been more than one. These were the only things he could now be reasonably sure of: 1) She'd been watching Torchwood long enough to know who Andy was and how to use him. 2) She'd somehow managed to find Andy and mindwhammy him into making that call and then forgetting about it. 3) This was a trap.

One he was going to walk right into. Because he couldn't do anything else.

As she must have known.

He began stalking the house. He'd avoid the obvious entrances, see if he could find a window that would give him access to the basement. That would be the best place to start.

*   *   *   *

"Well," said Owen, as he and Theamh looked at their reflections in the tinted windows of the Torchwood SUV. "Jack's definitely here...but the police definitely aren't."

"And you're wondering whether he sent them away," she said, as Owen looked up. "And what he's hiding."

He looked up at Theamh. "That's very annoying."

"So I've been told, but you can't help radiating and I can't help picking it up. In any case, Captain apparently likes to hide things, even or especially from the people working for him. He's certainly hiding plenty from me."

"Just call him Jack," Owen said. "He's not really a captain."

Theamh paused, staring for a moment. Then she almost laughed.

"Ah," she said. "Sorry. I thought Captain was his used name. You know Captain mac Hark...oh, never mind."

"But you can't read his mind," Owen said.

"No. He's able to mask, I think...unless it has something to do with the utterly anomalous state of  _his_ connection."

"Oh you've noticed," Owen remarked.

"That his spirit and body are fused? Yes, I did happen to notice that. Idair's hair, what _do_ you take me for?"

Fused. The opposite of what had happened to Owen. Lucky bastard.

Owen recalled his mind to the task at hand.

"You should stay here. This is liable to be dangerous."

She shook her head. "I'm coming with you."

"I don't mean spiritually dangerous, I mean--do you even know how to use a gun?"

"What's a gun?" Theamh said.

"Oh Jesus," Owen groaned. He unlocked the SUV and opened the passenger door. "Wait in here, it's bulletproof, you'll be safe whatever happens."

"The hell I will," Theamh retorted. "Anyway, you've just shown me what a gun is, so I'm ready. Let's go."

She slammed the SUV door closed.

"You're still unarmed."

Theamh crossed her arms over her chest and gave him a stare that was starting to become familiar.

"Owen mac Harper," Theamh said, firmly. "If I chose, I could burn down this entire street with my bare hands. I am not  _unarmed._ _"_

Owen considered this. 

"All right then," he said. "But you listen to me and you follow my orders, cause you're not at home right now."

Theamh sighed. "I will, to the extent that your orders coincide with my own judgment about what is right, effective, and necessary."

He looked at her.

"We don't like to make promises," Theamh replied. "Especially about following orders."

Neither do I, Owen thought grimly, as they moved round the corner. At least not ones I have any intention of keeping.

"Well be careful and go slow," Owen said.

*  *  *  *  *

It was, of course, dark. The two half-buried windows gave just enough light to allow Jack to sidle along the wall, one hand skimming the wallpaper looking for obstructions. Turning on a flashlight would only make him a target. If she was going to be able to see him, he wanted to be able to see her.

Finally, his fingers found the little square plastic stub of a wall switch. He flattened himself back to the wall, took his favorite gun half-out of the holster, then put it back. Drawing first was not a good move in this situation. It would just help her disarm him faster.

Fighting the urge to close his eyes and flinch, Jack flipped the switch.

"Well," he said, out loud. "This is disappointing."

It was in fact quite a large room, and had probably once accommodated a butler's pantry and wine cellar. And it had all been ripped out and redone as a state-of-the-art modern kitchen. A huge slab of pink granite topped the 'island' in the center, which contained two gleaming stainless-steel sinks. A refrigerator that could easily have accommodated four Torchwood morgue drawers dominated one corner, its doors tastefully disguised with the same white-painted wood paneling that came halfway up the walls. Recessed into one wall was a little reading nook, covered with cushions and a tiny scented pillow needlepointed with the words KISS THE COOK. Running around the walls above the white paneling was a dainty rosebud print wallpaper that almost but not quite matched the pink of the granite. Gigantic round white shields of frosted glass depended from the ceiling, glowing with halogen light that rebounded painfully off the polished granite, the white paneling, and the veined marble tiles that covered the floor. There was one striped throw rug, with a thick shag pile, covering the floor near the sinks, and a Persian carpet under the blond, rectangular table and chairs in the far corner.

Jack could not imagine that she would be able to stand a single minute in this room. He himself found it so oppressively clean, shining so brightly with the naivete of affluence, that he felt a strong desire to just unload a couple of his weapons into the refrigerator's smug and blank front door.

Nevertheless, he moved away from the wall toward the fridge. He might as well check it for confirmation. It was still possible, after all, that this had in fact been a misunderstanding and he was in the basement of some innocent family's ostentatious but not actually evil home.

He grabbed the silver strip running down the left side of the fridge door and hauled it open.

All the shelves inside were empty, except for one. In the exact center of the center shelf was a glass jar with a tight-fitting lid. It was filled with clear liquid. Floating inside it, distorted by the curvature of the glass and the refraction of the light, was a dark reddish-purple mass of muscle about the size and shape of a human heart.

Jack heard someone behind him laughing.

He slammed the door shut and spun around, reaching automatically for a weapon. He kept his hand there on the butt of the gun inside his underarm holster, while his eyes darted around the room.

It was apparently empty. But he had not imagined that laughter. That low, throaty chuckle of pleasure and satisfaction.

Don't move, he told himself. Don't go looking for her. If you stay where you are, at least you limit the number of positions from which she can jump you.

"And why would you want to do that?" said a voice. 

His body recognized that voice immediately. Low for a woman's, with a burr that could either wrap you in velvet or scrape you raw. Soft and insinuating, at the moment. But when you listened to that voice, you could always hear, somewhere in the future, a scream that hadn't been born yet.

Damn it. He tightened the mask.

"This will be no fun at all if I can't see you," Jack said, looking in what he wildly hoped would be the right direction.

It was not the right direction. When the air began to shimmer, it was over by the opposite wall.

There she stood. She didn't look a day older. She'd traded in the dark robe for a pair of black leggings, a black turtleneck sweater, and a black leather coat--full-length, and cut not unlike his own, which she wore unbuttoned. Her hands rested on her hips, the nails still blunt and innocent of polish. The black boots he remembered. And the red-lipped smile, the cruel curve with just a hint of teeth. The pallid skin of her face. The bright blue eyes, underneath the dark brows, each with a sweep like the wing of a raven. The dark hair swept back, coiled into an updo.

He opened his mouth. But he couldn't speak. Not because of anything she was doing to him. Just because he was stunned by the sight of all that dark beauty. The curve of her calves, the arc of her hip, the swell of the black cashmere that swathed her breasts. Every inch of that body stirred the ache of memory. He felt as if he had already been transfixed. Was already pinned to the wall with one of her black-handled knives, his viscera screaming around the tear, waiting for life to drip out of his body.

Keeping her eyes on his, she lifted one hand to the wall switch.

"There," she said. "You've had your fun."

She flipped the switch. The room went dark. 

In the moment it took Jack to decide whether to stand and fight or make a break for the stairs, a dark shape leapt toward him through the gloom, easily clearing the pink granite island. 

The feel of her bare hand on his throat set off sparks of desire all through his body. She tightened her fingers, grinding her groin painfully into his. He felt one of the guns leap from his pocket, no doubt straight into her hand. Well, that was why he'd brought so many. She could take anything off him; but she only had two hands.

He felt the cold circlet of steel press up against his temple. The throb of pain there was nothing compared to the throbbing pain that had engulfed his entire lower body.

"Oh baby," he murmured. Her face was quite close to his now, though still blurred by darkness. "All this time and you still slay me."

For all the coldness of her voice, her breath was hot, and not quite steady. 

Jack darted his head forward. The pistol fell away as he grabbed the back of her head with both hands. He pressed his open mouth on hers, parting her lips with his tongue. She let him do it. Her tongue slid past his, a serpentine motion, its roughened surface rasping across his own. He drew in air from her lungs, let out their mingled breath in a soft moan.

His head slammed back against the refrigerator door. First one hand, then the other, was forced back against it, grappled to the paneling with invisible bonds. When she had his ankles spread apart and pinned as well, she slid back toward him, as close as she could be without touching him.

Her breathing slowed. He felt her deliberately, slowly, returning the gun to its previous location. Felt the pressure of that little ring of metal, now warmed by his own heat.

"Where are they, Jack?" she said.

"If you're referring to my balls, I think you know--"  

"I am not." The ring of metal dug harder into the skin over his temple. "They don't interest me."

She was all business today, apparently.

"Where are they?" she repeated.

"Where are what?"  

Her iron grip on his throat tightened. If she closed her hand any more she would entirely occlude his airstream.

"The things you stole from me."

"I steal a lot of things," Jack gasped. "You'll need to be more specific."

He felt the heat rushing down the barrel of the gun. He felt the skin tear, the bones shatter. By the time the sound of the gunshot reached his ears, he was dead.

*  *  *  *  *

Theamh was just closing the front door behind them when Owen heard the gunshot. It came from somewhere beneath the hardwood floor of the entrance hall. 

"That little miniature explosion," said Theamh. "Was that by chance a--"

Owen waved at her to be silent. He drew his gun. He turned his head briefly back toward her and whispered, "Stay here."

Theamh stopped moving. Owen felt her eyes on him as he moved silently down the hall. How was he feeling that, anyway? 

As he peered through the doorway on the left, it occurred to him that if anything she'd told him that afternoon was right, then sight lines shouldn't matter. He ought to be able to see behind and around him. He ought to have eyes in the back of his head.

Maybe he was only still seeing this way out of habit.

He closed his eyes.

It took a moment. But gradually, with his eyes closed, it began to come back to him. The dim shapes of living room furniture. The hardwood floor beneath. The doorway just ahead, leading to a flight of steps going down. The panes of glass in the front door, and Theamh's figure silhouetted against them. 

Could he see downstairs?

Evidently not. Evidently his powers of perception were still limited by the physical location of his body. Just not the location of his actual eyes.

Still with his eyes closed, Owen advanced down the stairway. He could see the light coming from the bottom of the stairs, hear, below them, someone else's breathing, labored, rasping, loud. And someone else's, lighter and slower and far more regular.

Two people, he thought. One's probably Jack.

As if on cue, Jack screamed.

Owen's eyes flew open. He took the few remaining stairs as fast as he could, holding his gun out in front of him, clutched tight in both hands.

The lights in the ceiling were blazing. Owen instantly regretted having cultivated that new 360 degree view.

What had at one time been a nice if slightly vulgar kitchen was now an abbatoir. The white paneled door of an enormous fridge was slashed with streaks of bright red and dappled with chunks of what had at one time been Jack's brains. Huge and hideously misshapen bloodstains darkened irregular patches of rosebud-print paper, all around the room. Streams of blood were even now trickling over the beveled edges of a rose-pink granite slab on which lay the body of Captain Jack Harkness. His coat was rolled up in a corner, sodden with blood; his suspenders dangled uselessly from his belt; his cotton shirt, torn in several places on the sleeves and ripped open down the front, was studded with scarlet handprints. Crouched over him, on top of the granite slab, was some kind of black creature, with four legs and a disheveled mane of dark hair. As he watched, it reared up, lifted one paw, fixed all the toes into a rigid blade shape, and drew it back, ready to plunge it right into a shallow red groove that had opened up in the middle of Jack's bare chest.

Owen fired a shot at the thing. It missed, and buried itself in the fridge door.

The creature's head turned toward him. For the first time, he realized it was a woman; and that her left hand--the hand that had _not_ been about to slice open Jack's chest--was holding a large and quite destructive automatic pistol that Jack had recently brought back from one of his forays into the near future.

"Torchwood," Owen shouted. "You're under arrest. Drop the gun and put your hands in the air."

Jack's blood-streaked face turned toward him. 

"OWEN!" Jack cried. "RUN!"

Owen tried to fire again. His fingers closed on thin air. His gun spun out of his hands, and right into the red right hand of the woman still kneeling on the slab.

Jack sat up, reaching into his trouser pocket.

Without even looking at Jack, the woman pointed her left hand at Jack's chest and put a bullet right through his heart. He collapsed back onto the slab. She stood up, black boots planted on the blood-coated granite, aiming a gun down at Owen with each hand.

"You're an interesting little abomination, aren't you, Owen?" she said. "A friend of Jack's, no doubt."

With the new eyes in the back of his head, Owen saw Theamh barge through the door behind him. Her hands were in what he assumed were the ready position. The look of pure shock on her face, of course, made sense, as did the way her mouth sort of fell open.

The woman in black turned her eyes to Theamh.

"And who's the plucky sidekick, Owen?" she said, in the tones of exquisite boredom.

Theamh just stared at her, as one of the woman's hands shifted to train its gun on her.

"What's the matter, stranger?" said the woman in black. "Cat got your tongue?"

Two things burst out of Theamh at about the same time and about the same speed. One was a shriek of outrage, and the other was a torrent of white flame, flung toward the woman in black from Theamh's open right hand.

It was a miracle the gun didn't go off. As soon as she saw the flames, the woman in black had stiffened in shock. It was some sort of reflex, Owen judged, that made her drop both guns and fling her hands in the direction of the stream of fire that Theamh was still sending her. Red flame erupted from them. As a torrent of red and white fire churned the air above him, Owen dove onto the marble, dragging himself across the red and slippery marble floor toward the guns. When he had collected both, he slid under the shelter of the island's overhang and tried to take stock of his position.

Jack lay inert and open-eyed on the slab. The woman in black, from her superior height, was now dealing out red fire with one hand. The other was covered in white fire, stretching up her arm to the shoulder like some long and flickering glove. Theamh had her back against the wall. She was sweating, and nearly shaking, but the fire was still pouring out of her; and she was shouting something, over and over. It might have been something like "Where is she?"

The woman in black's attention was fully occupied. He could take her from behind.

Owen slid out away from the island. He got to his feet.

One foot slipped in the blood. He caught the edge of the granite slab with one hand. 

The woman in black swung toward him, raising her fiery red hand.

Owen fired.

A spurt of bullets burst out of the gun. He saw them strike her body, right on the sternum, one after the other.

They ricocheted off her. Onto the granite, onto the marble, onto the ceiling fixtures. The air was filled with flying, smoking metal. He flattened himself back onto the floor as they pinged all over the room.

He heard Theamh let out that special scream people only make after they've been penetrated by one or more bullets.

There was a long sizzling rip. The last of the bullets pattered to rest. He could hear nothing from Theamh but her heavy, halting breath. She was slumped in a corner, trying to cross her arms over her chest. But her right hand kept slipping off her shoulder. There were three round holes in her plaid flannel sleeve. Three of Owen's bullets had pinged their way into her right forearm. One of them looked to have broken the radius.

"Now," said the woman in black, sitting down on the edge of the slab. "Before you die, you can tell me who you are and how you got here."

"Thurk you, Lythril," Theamh said, gritting her teeth and sweating even harder.

"So you know  _my_ name," said the woman. "If you were any good at all, I'd know yours by now. But of course you aren't; and so I don't."

Owen realized that the white fire was gone. Both of this woman's hands were ringed in red fire now. 

"You came after me hoping to make your reputation," sneered the woman. "Well, I've changed my mind. I don't care what name you use. No one will remember it."

Owen saw Jack's eyes open. He heard him take a breath. 

The woman spun around. Owen once again found himself grabbing after empty air as both guns flew straight back to her as if they'd been magnetized. She pointed both at Jack's blood-smeared torso.

"This  _again?_ " he demanded. "Could you at least vary the routine?"

There was a commotion on the other side of the island. With a grunt, Theamh launched herself toward the woman in black.

Both women screamed so loudly, and so shrilly, that Jack and Owen let out their own screams of protest. The woman in black toppled off the island. She and Theamh were tangled up on the blood-slick floor, all limbs flailing. Theamh, still screaming, had one hand clamped around the back of the other woman's neck, the fingers pushed down under the fabric of the sweater, holding on even though the woman in black was twitching as if she were being electrocuted right there.

Jack's boots hit the floor. He almost slid onto his arse. But he braced himself on the edge of the island with one hand, and with the other kicked the woman in black as hard as he could in the head. The kick broke Theamh's grip, and sent the other woman skidding over the slick marble tiles. 

Theamh rolled over on her stomach. She tried getting to her hands and knees, with only one hand. 

"Help her up," Jack said, nodding at Theamh.

Theamh vomited onto the marble.

"Oh, great," Owen groaned.

"Thurk you," Theamh gasped at him.

While Owen picked his way over to her, Jack pulled the fridge doors open. He pulled out all the shelves and threw them onto the floor. A glass jar flew out of the fridge, hit the marble, and shattered, sending a rubbery lump of red meat sliding across the floor in a pool of pink liquid. Then he grabbed the other woman--the kick must have knocked her out; she was completely limp--and shoved her, boots and all, into the fridge. He closed the doors on her just as Owen managed to get Theamh on her feet, leaning on him with her good arm wrapped around her shoulders.

Jack reached into his sock and pulled out a small acetylene torch. He applied it to the latch on the fridge door. The metal glowed, then rippled, then fused.

He turned off the torch and stowed it. He grabbed his blood-soaked coat, swept up all the remaining guns, and said, "Let's get out of here."

"What about--" Owen began.

"We don't have time!"

Owen began walking Theamh up the stairs. He had the feeling that she wanted to be shouting at him; but when she opened her mouth, all that came out was a kind of crying whimper. The arm was killing her, of course; but that wouldn't account for the shape she was in.

"What's the matter with her?" Owen asked, as they began staggering toward the SUV, leaving bloodstained footprints as they went.

"Shriias and dark users can't touch each other without experiencing searing pain," Jack said, opening the door. "I knew that, but I didn't realize how bad it would be. Lucky for us though."

"How many times did she kill you down there?" Owen demanded.

Jack shook his head. "Eight. Maybe ten. I lost track."

Owen went around and opened the door on the other side. Between the two of them, they managed to get Theamh laid out in the back seat. Owen perched on the edge. It was about time to get that sleeve off, clean the wounds, and get the arm in a sling. The rest could wait till they reached the hub. 

Jack leapt into the driver's seat and threw the SUV into gear.

"How you feeling, T-Bone?" Jack called over his shoulder, as the SUV squealed away from the curb.

"FUCK...YOU!" Theamh screamed back at him.

"I see you're learning the local argot," Jack said, in that hearty tone Owen so hated.

Theamh gritted her teeth, let out a long hiss of agony, and drew breath for another attempt at speech.

"You BASTARD!"

"Theamh, hold still," Owen said, as he began cutting the sleeve of her shirt off at the shoulder.

"You stole the...fucking...firebridge from  _LYTHRIL!"_ she yelled. "You...ASSHOLE! Why aren't you DEAD?"

"I can't die," Jack replied.

Theamh screamed again as Owen tried to align the ends of her broken radius.

"How nice for you!" Theamh forced out. "And all the people you love and everything you care about, are THEY immortal too?"

Owen, knotting the scraps of flannel into a sling, waited to hear the answer. 

It was not forthcoming.

"That BITCH!" Theamh screamed, pounding the upholstery with her good hand. "Pretending she doesn't know who I am!"

"I don't think she was pretending," Jack said, wearily. "I think she crossed through the rift at a different point in your timeline. I think she hasn't met you yet."

Theamh let out another hiss, half pain and half frustration.

"Well, she's definitely met YOU," Theamh yelled back at him.

Owen paused with the sling in his hands. "Why do you say..." he began.

"She doesn't like mess," Theamh gasped. "She wouldn't make that much splatter and spray over someone she never cared about."

"Jesus, Jack," Owen cried. "Are ALL your exes psychotic killers?"

"Not _all_ of them," Jack said.

"Son of a bitch," Theamh whispered, closing her eyes. "You stupid, stupid, son of a bitch."

Owen slipped her wrist into the sling. The SUV went bumping away over the cobbled, with Theamh's curses hanging in the air.

END CHAPTER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


	5. PREFERRED PROVIDER

When the TARDIS doors opened, Martha Jones knew, you never knew what you'd be going out into. When the Torchwood portal opened, Martha Jones was beginning to realize, you couldn't even imagine what it would be bringing in. Ianto and Toshiko had been down in this bunker for years and they had probably seen almost everything. But they were still jolted out of their seats by  _this_ spectacle. There were  _several_ pints of blood soaking Jack's trousers and his torn shirt, which clung to his skin like Carrie's prom dress. The coat he threw down onto the tiles as soon as he strode through the opening had apparently soaked up several more. Everyone had told her about Jack's miraculous regenerative powers, of course. But she still couldn't work out where it all  _came_ from. Just volumetrically, how was one human system making that much new blood, over and over and over?

Toshiko's cry of alarm pierced the air above her.

"Oh my God--Owen! What's happened to you?"

Because Owen had come staggering through the doorway, with the new arrival leaning on him. Her left arm was draped across his shoulders. Her right arm was in a makeshift sling, which was also soaked through with blood. They were both covered in it, handprints and splahses and spatters.

Jack looked up at Toshiko's station, pointing at her to sit down. "Toshiko. Lockdown. Now."

Toshiko, who had risen from her seat, nodded and returned immediately to her screen. Alarms began sounding, sirens blared, locks clicked into place and seals set.

"Martha, you have a patient." 

"So I see," Martha replied, moving forward.

"I'll do it, Jack," Owen said, wearily. "It's only bullets, God, I've dug enough shrapnel out of you alone I could build a bridge with it."

Martha stopped. "Oh, well, if it's just the arm--"

Jack swung on Owen, eyes blazing. "No. You've done enough today."

"That was not my fault!" Owen's hand, which was holding onto Theamh's left wrist, clenched so hard she cried out. "I hit the bloody target! Nobody told me she was bulletproof!"

"Owen," Martha said, as she finally got a good look at Theamh's face. It was white as paper, under the blood. "Let me just--"

"Normally the bullets go  _into the target!_ " Owen shouted. "I'd have killed her if she wasn't--fucking--"

"Well you could easily have killed someone else," Jack retorted. "You are not firing on all cylinders, Owen, and you are done for the day. Martha will take care of Theamh, and--"

"I want Owen," Theamh said.

She was trying to shout it; but her strength was not good. Still, everyone stopped.

"Listen, T-bone, a week ago I'd have agreed with you, but--" Jack began.

"I. WANT. OWEN." Her voice was coming back up to normal levels now. "I want OWEN to do the procedure and then after  _that_ happens  _you_ are going to tell me the story of how you decided it would be a good move to steal a one-of-a-kind legendary magical artifact rumored to have the power to bring back the dead from the most powerful and ruthless dark user of my generation  _who is also thurking obsessed with becoming immortal!"_

She pushed off from Owen's shoulders and faced Jack on her own two feet, slightly wobbly but apparently sustained by the white-hot fires of anger.

"I would say that that is the  _stupidest_ thing I have ever heard of, except that that  _I_ just picked a fight with a dark user while I was out of hreapa and that _may_ actually have been dumber."

Her breathing was definitely labored. Her face was even paler. Martha could not imagine why Theamh had not yet collapsed from shock. 

"Martha's a very good doctor," Jack said, as if she hadn't spoken. "I know you're not used to--"

"That has NOTHING TO DO WITH IT!" Theamh roared. "I'm the one who's bleeding, I'm the one who thurking needs this arm, and I CHOOSE OWEN."

Martha began to look at Theamh in a new and decidedly less favorable light.

Jack sighed.

"Owen, take her to the hospital area."

"Thank you," Owen said, leaving a trail of sarcasm behind him as he piloted Theamh out of the room.

"Let me apologize for her," Jack said, embarrassed. "She's from a very homogeneous society, and--"

"No worries," Martha said, coldly.

She watched Jack spring toward the stairs and clamber up to Toshiko's station, crouching down by her, pointing at the screen with one bloodstreaked hand. He didn't even notice her shrinking away from him in disgust.

"Toshiko, I planted a C253 at the site, can you see if it's reading?"

Toshiko nodded. Her fingers flew, briefly, as swiftly and accurately as any surgeon's. Martha couldn't see what came up on the screen, but it certainly made Jack happy.

"YES!" he shouted. "Yes. Monitor that continuously, Toshiko, and alert me the instant you see ANY movement." He began leaping down the stairs, touching the comm in his ear with one hand. "Gwen! Gwen, I'm--yes--I know--I'm sorry--I need your help--Rhys too--" He was moving across the floor now, toward his office. "Because we're going to need a truck, that's why. Toshiko!" Jack called up at her. "Cancel the lockdown, we're safe for now. I'll be back in--"

"Jack," Ianto called. "You can't just go out again in--"

Jack stopped, turned, and bellowed at him. "WHY NOT?"

Even Martha was shocked. It was as if, for a moment, Jack had genuinely forgotten who Ianto was.

"Because you need a change of clothes," Ianto murmured, sadly.

Jack stopped. He looked down at his trousers. He looked at his hands. He ran one of them through his hair, and grimaced when it got stuck in clumps matted with blood.

"I'm sorry," he said.

Martha stared at him. Toshiko's fingers stopped tapping. She'd never heard Jack speak in that tone before. He looked bewildered, distressed, almost to the point of dementia.

"I'm sorry, Ianto," he said. The corners of his mouth began to tremble. "I'm sorry."

He fled toward his office, with Ianto in pursuit.

Hearing Toshiko sigh, Martha looked up toward her station. She mounted the stairs, slowly.

"I know it's obnoxious to read over your shoulder," she began."

"Please." Toshiko turned the screen toward her. 

Martha could see, in that grainy blue spectrum of all their security monitors, the interior of a large, rectangular, white space, containing an only slightly smaller dark blotch. It resolved itself, slowly, into the slumped figure of a human body. It was like looking at an ultrasound. A stillborn baby inside a shiny artificial womb.

Not stillborn. She was breathing. Just not moving.

"What is that?" Martha finally asked. "Is it...a morgue, or..."

"I think," Toshiko said, in clipped tones, "that that man has literally put a woman in a refrigerator."

*   *   *   *   *

Ianto knew he shouldn't really be this worried. The others perhaps hadn't seen Jack have one of these mini-collapses; but he was familiar with the protocol. Jack had a kind of energy cycle, and it was not uncommon for Jack--once everyone else had gone home--to crash from manic exuberance right down to this half-paralysis, during which he was as passive and as mild as a little boy. But this didn't feel quite the same. Jack let Ianto undress him, lead him into the shower, get the blood out of his hair, dry him off...and never said a word to him. Eighteen different opportunities for salacious double-entendres and even more salacious actions came and went and there was Jack, in a fresh shirt, trousers, and suspenders, sitting at his desk with clean wet hair, giving off a number of delicious scents from half a dozen grooming products...and he was still just staring down at the surface of his desk. He seemed very old somehow. As if he were suffering from dementia. It was unsettling.

"Jack," Ianto murmured. "Jack, what's...what's the matter?"

Jack raised his head. He fixed on Ianto a pair of haggard, hollow eyes.

"I'm sorry," Jack said.

"Could you please stop saying that?" Ianto said. "It makes me feel as if you've been to the future and seen my death."

Jack let out a soft, ironic chuckle.

"I need to tell you the story," Jack said. "I want you to hear it first. Because I do have to tell T-bone, and I don't want you learning it from her. She won't understand. She can't possibly."

Ianto was one hundred per cent sure that he did not need to hear this story. 

"How long is this story?" Ianto said, warily. 

Jack waved his question away. "Till Gwen and Rhys get back with the truck, we've got nothing but time. Sit. It's a good story," Jack said, wistfully. "It would make a great movie. NC-17, of course."

"Of course," Ianto murmured.

Jack leaned back in his chair, put his hands behind his head, and looked up at the ceiling.

While he waited, Ianto tried to console himself with the thought that Jack was finally going to tell him, for once, the truth about his past. That meant something, didn't it? 

It was pathetic, hoarding the little scraps and bits of Jack's trust, the trail of tiny crumbs that Jack scattered through their days together. He didn't put them in his diary; he stored them all in his heart. All the little moments, spoken and unspoken, that gave Ianto hope that maybe he mattered. That he could perhaps be more than a blip on Jack's radar; that he might be remembered as something more than a name on a drawer in the morgue. True love was a game for children; forever was for mere mortals; he could never hope to be The One, or even--he thought sometimes on his moodier days--among the top one hundred. As much has he seemed to enjoy everything they did, the laws of probability alone suggested that Jack had done it all harder, faster, more passionately, at some other time with someone else. Ianto had brought this up only once. Jack had glared at him and finally spat out, "What does it matter? They're dead or gone or both. You matter more than all of them because  _you're here now._ "

Not precisely a declaration of love. But the best Ianto was ever likely to do.

"I have been half in love with death," Jack sighed.

"Easeful," Ianto said.

"I beg your pardon?"

"Easeful death," Ianto replied. "Keats. Ode to a Nightingale. 'Darkling I listen, and full many a time, I have been half in love with _easeful_ death.'"

"Well," Jack said. "It was never easeful. I did plenty of ceasing upon the midnight, but always with TREMENDOUS pain."

He looked over Ianto, with that inscrutable sadness of his.

"And...to be honest," Jack said, "I was a little more than _half_  in love."

*   *   *   *

It was only because of the change, Owen thought, that he was able to form the thought  _Maybe Jack was right about me._ Had he still been housed in his actual brain, he felt sure the neural pathways would have prevented the requisite synapses from firing.

And yet, the evidence suggested that in fact he had no business handling a scalpel, or anything else. Because Theamh was still lying there on the table, still gritting her teeth in pain; and he hadn't even washed the blood away from the incision site. He was, instead, staring into the medicine cabinet where they kept all the emergency syringes. Just staring and staring and staring, looking from one fluid-filled cylinder to the next. And he couldn't imagine why.

The disembodied-spirit 360-degree perspective was, he had realized immediately, completely inappropriate for surgical work, which required a narrow focus; and he'd been quite pleased with how easily he'd worked out how to reduce it to normal. But it did mean that he was getting very tired of looking at these damn syringes.

He had in mind a clear sequence of actions to perform, so routine he barely had to think them: immobilize the arm, clean and sterilize the site, infiltrate with local anaesthetic because Jack had spent the whole bloody ride back to the hub drilling it into them that Ideirens, which is apparently what she was, couldn't tolerate general. But he had actually done none of them. He'd dumped Theamh rather awkwardly onto the table and there she'd stayed, as blood-streaked and angry as ever, while he went straight for a case full of drugs he was not planning to use and just...stared at them.

He finally reached in and plucked the petalumine from its holder. He admired the purple color for a moment. Then he put it back.

Why was he doing this? How long would this be going on?

"Any time this kyelran," Theamh called over.

His head swerved to look back at her. 

He meant to ask her what a kyelran was, but he didn't. Instead he stared at Theamh's white and blood-dappled face. She still looked like hell. But there was a kind of...a kind of calm, a kind of resignation on it now.

"The thing is..." Theamh began. And then said, "Well, never mind. I'm sure you think you know best."

She was striving for a neutral and nonchalant tone; but her breathing was starting to sound more like gasping and the pallor of her face was tinged with green. 

"What?"

Owen fired the word out through almost-clenched teeth. 

"I mean I know what you're looking for, at least I think I do," Theamh said. "And I might even have stepped up there to help you find it, on any other day."

Theamh moved her arms as if to sit up, but decided against it.

"But not actually today," Theamh wheezed, as she kept her eyes fixed on Owen. "Today I have work to do. So I really can't just lie here watching you silently panic as you realize that even though you have possessed Owen Harper you do not, in fact, have access to any of his memories and thoughts, because they're not  _in_ his mindspace any more, because his brain is dead and your magical gauntlet turned him inside out. He's not living in his head any more. You are alone in there, Lythril," she said, "and you don't know your way around that cabinet any more than I know my way around this city, so just forget about poisoning me for right now."

Owen's body stiffened. He thought of several questions he would like to ask, but instead of asking any of them, he picked up the nearest scalpel.

"Before you do anything rash," Theamh sighed, "might I draw your attention to the security cameras?"

Owen looked up, scanning the ceiling for those little round camera eyes.

"All the rooms in this place are continuously monitored," Theamh said. "Toshiko explained this to me. They don't keep the sound up, of course, that would drive them mad; but they keep an eye out for unusual activity. I know you heard Jack tell Toshiko to watch your body," she went on, as Owen's eyes flicked from camera to camera, "but I've met Toshiko, and I've noticed a few things about her. One: she can certainly do two things at once. And two: she never takes her eyes off Owen."

Owen's eyes froze on the camera mounted just above the entrance arch. His fingers tightened on the scalpel.

"So it's like this," Theamh said. "If you vacate Owen now and overtake someone else--Martha, for instance--then Owen will tell everyone you've infiltrated Torchwood. On the other hand, if you stay in Owen, and you can't figure out how to ACT like Owen any better than you have so far, then Toshiko will be alarmed, and she'll alarm everyone else. Owen's already been possessed once since his death, they know what it looks like. And then you won't be at liberty to perpetrate whatever revenge you're planning on Jack."

His eyes fastened themselves onto Theamh's face. The scalpel still winked in his hand.

"So you're trapped in Owen's head, unless you want to be exposed," Theamh said. "That's your problem. I have a broken arm full of jagged bits of metal which will melt, burn, and poison me the next time I try to make fire; and my doctor is possessed by my arch-nemesis. That's my problem."

Owen's eyes narrowed.

"At your age you can't be anyone's arch-nemesis."

Theamh's eyes sparked just a tiny bit.

"I had a head start."

"I've never heard of you," Owen snapped back.

"The point is," Theamh said, "you don't know how you're going to solve your problem. But I do."

"You do," Owen repeated, in a familiarly skeptical tone.

"You're going to let Owen do this operation," Theamh said. "You'll withdraw from his arms and hands and keep his brain, mouth, and anything else he doesn't need to do the operation. He'll take care of my arm in his inimitable Owen style, allaying any suspicions Toshiko might be currently developing during this uncharacteristic pause in the action. While he is doing the operation, as long as he is doing it right and well, and as long as you do not attempt to hurt either Owen or myself physically, I agree not to raise the alarm."

Owen's body was still for a few seconds.

"And after it's done?" said Owen.

"As long as you stay in Owen," Theamh said, "and as long as you make no attempt to hurt either Owen or myself, I promise not to tell anyone else in Torchwood that your spirit has left your body. As soon as you leave Owen, or as soon as you offer to hurt him or myself, the bargain is broken and I am under no further obligation to you."

While the lunatic who was evidently controlling his body now paused to consider this, Theamh said, "Owen, don't worry. I will get her out of you, one way or another, probably sooner rather than later. Dark users aren't very good at honoring their bargains."

Owen's teeth were grinding. But he was able to make himself put down the scalpel. He reached for the disinfectant. He stood there holding it in midair.

"He's probably also going to need his legs," Theamh said.

After a moment, Owen stumped over to her bedside, a bit stiffly.

"I am  _really_ looking forward to killing you," Owen said, matter-of-factly, as his hands began wiping down the wounds. 

"No doubt." Theamh grimaced as the antiseptic began to sting. "But let me tell you, Lythril, you wouldn't enjoy killing me now anywhere  _near_ as much as you'd enjoy killing me later."

Owen glanced at her sharply. His mouth opened. But then it closed again; and after that, she let him get to work.

*   *   *   *   *

Jack braced one forearm against the pane of glass that separated his office from the rest of the hub, staring moodily through it. Everything seemed in order. Toshiko was at her station. Owen was working on Theamh's arm. Rhys and Gwen had the address and were on their way out to pick up the refrigerator. 

And Ianto was sitting behind him, silently trying to deal with the story Jack was telling him. Jack couldn't decide at the moment whether it would be worse to see Ianto's face, or worse not to.

"I was dead while he brought me into her castle, of course," he said. "So I didn't know where it was. I still don't know where it is. She has a room in the basement, there's a stone floor..."

Ianto took in a hissing, apprehensive breath. Jack turned around. Ianto was still in his chair, his face still...mostly...impassive. But Jack knew there had to be plenty going on behind it.

"You've never met her, you don't know what she can do. She made me drink this..." He grimaced at the memory of it. "I mean it was foul, I don't even know how many bodily fluids she put it in it but it looked like motor oil and it smelled like bleach. But I got it down, and then..."

In spite of Ianto, in spite of his own memories, he could almost feel the fire again as he spoke of it.

"Let me just say," he finally said, "that if she could bottle and sell this stuff, she would put Viagra out of business in a heartbeat."

"Eurgh," said Ianto.

"I felt like a new man," Jack said. "I said, 'Did you make this?' and she gave me this very portentous, very dark 'Yes.' And I said, 'This is FANTASTIC! Can I have the recipe?'"

Ianto laughed, in spite of everything.

"And that's what happened," Jack said, seizing the opportunity. "She laughed. She laughed! And..." The images and memories crowded back on him, bringing a smile to his face in spite of all his intentions. "And, you know, I'm not saying it wasn't painful, but it was good. It was exhausting and terrifying and degrading and unimaginably perverse, and she killed me at the end of it, sure, but...it was good. For _both_ of us."

When the silence became too chilling, Jack said, "Say something, Ianto."

"It can't have been good."

"It was."

"It was forced on you."

"I said yes."

"You couldn't have. She never asked you."

"I. SAID. YES."

Ianto burst out of the chair. Normally he never moved that fast unless someone was shooting at him.

"That's what you ALWAYS say!" Ianto shouted. "That's what you always tell yourself. That you said yes. No matter how awful it was or how little choice you had. Captain Jack Harkness always says yes. Ready for anything. Like it's your duty somehow. Do you never say no?" Ianto shouted. "Don't you think you have the right?"

Jack found that his eyes were stinging a bit. He couldn't get angry. It was honest affection that was making Ianto do this. It was love. It was everything that made Ianto Ianto, everything Jack kept coming back to at the end of every dark and bloody and horrible day. It wasn't Ianto's fault that he couldn't understand this, or even that he didn't want to.

"I have died over a thousand times, Ianto," Jack said. "In every conceivable way. It hurts every time. It hurts till it's unbearable. It hurts till you think it's going to kill you, and then it does. Most people only ever have to die once. I go through agony no human being was ever designed to stand and I go through it OVER and OVER and OVER again. Dying is the worst thing that will ever happen to any of you. It happens to me all the time. If I hadn't worked out a way of enjoying it, I wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning."

Ianto stared. 

"And if you can enjoy dying," Jack said, "then you can enjoy ANYTHING. And if you can, then you may as well."

The look of paralyzed shock on Ianto's face was not something Jack could enjoy, at the moment.

"You... _enjoy_...dying?" Ianto whispered.

Jack took a step back.

"Not exactly," Jack said. "It's not...the actual dying is not...pleasurable."

"I should think not!" Ianto retorted.

"It's the coming back," Jack murmured. "That's the rush."

*  *   *  *  *

Owen placed the retractors and took a firm grip on the pincers. His hands could still grip pretty well, but he wondered how long that would last. Surely without any sweat every moistening it, the skin would dry and crack. Or would he not lose moisture, either? Would everything just stay...static? Forever?

"This is so much less unpleasant on the dead," he said, as he eased the pincers into the first opening. "They don't  _bleed_ everywhere."

"Excuse me for living," Theamh muttered.

It was a good thing Owen couldn't cry any more. Salt in the wound makes everything worse. But he found the sight of Theamh's exposed flesh, the oozing blood and the torn, hurt, inflamed, twitching fibers of the muscles, unbearable. Not because it was disgusting; none of that had ever troubled him. Because it was alive. Because inside the narrow area of Theamh's large body on which all his forces were concentrated, it was all still going on. Blood flowing, vessels pulsing, cells dividing, clots forming. There was more life in a few inches of this stranger's flesh than there would ever again be in his whole body.

Since he'd come back, it had just been one thing after another. He'd never just...felt...before, how dead he was. Inside and out.

 

He got one of the bullets out. It dropped with its little ping into a petri dish.

When the pause got too long, Theamh said, "Remember the bargain, Lythril."

"It's not my fault," Owen snapped. "Come on, Owen Harper, do your job before I get bored and start looking for things to do with you."

"I'm sorry, Owen," Theamh said. "I know this is awful. But I can't make fire safely till all that metal is out of me, and if I can't make fire I can't protect you from her."

"As if you could," Owen said, bending over and going back to work. "Even if you had  _three_ good arms."

Theamh didn't answer. Owen had to dig around a bit for the next bullet, and it couldn't have been pleasant for her.

"I don't mind staying here, inside your new friend," Owen went on. "Such a monstrosity. So many possibilities. Such fun."

"Yes," Theamh said. "Jack must have been a  _lot_ of fun to you, Lythril. The only man in the world you can't kill or overtake. With everyone else, there's a limit to what they can stand, there's a finite amount of torture they can survive and then poof! you push them over the edge and they're gone. But not Jack Harkness. Oh, he must have been your VERY favorite toy."

"Please," Owen said, as the pincers finally gripped the bullet. "Don't even try to understand what we had. It would destroy your tiny little virginal mind."

"You know, Lythril," Theamh said, in a voice that was almost close to a light bantering tone. "Owen's doing his best, I'm sure; but this all REALLY hurts. And yet it's almost worth it, just to hear you say that."

"Why?" Owen said.

"Because," Theamh said. "Now I know you lost someone." 

*   *   *   *   *

"Are you saying," Ianto gasped. "Are you saying--are you saying--that you  _stayed_ with her? Voluntarily?"

"Of course I stayed!" Jack shouted. He and Ianto were nose to nose now, not touching but so close, each wrapped inside a crackling field of the other's angry energy. "I'm an immortal masochist. She's a sadistic killer. It was MAGIC."

"Even after she ripped your heart out," Ianto said.

"Oh, _especially_   after that," Jack breathed. 

Jack could feel Ianto's outraged breath warm on his face. He could see Ianto's large blue eyes beginning to water. He thought, for a moment, that this conversation was the hottest thing he and Ianto had ever done together.

Then Ianto's eyes brimmed over and the tears began to fall.

Jack spun away, pacing back to the window.

"You don't understand," he said. "You don't..."

Behind him, he could hear Ianto trying to choke down a sob.

"Ianto..." Jack turned around. "Ianto, don't. I'm not worth it. I'm...I am...I don't even know how old I am, but I can't possibly be as old as I feel. I feel older than the planets, older than the universe. So much life and so many places and people I've known and...and lost, and lost, and _lost_ ," he said. "Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart."

"William Butler Yeats," Ianto murmured, still crying.

"Jack Harkness," Jack retorted. "Willie fucking stole that line from me and I'm  _still_  pissed off about it. Ianto...listen..."

Ianto crumpled back into his chair. Jack went over and crouched down by him, looking up into his miserable face.

"We think our memories are stored in our brains," he said, putting one hand over Ianto's and pressing it. "And they are but...that's not the only place. The hands remember, the eyes remember. The heart remembers. The heart remembers," he said, and now he was crying too. "It beats and it bleeds and it breaks, Ianto, that is not just a figure of speech. Everything you love and lose, your heart remembers. When she found me that first time my heart was in more pieces than a Roman mosaic. It was just nothing but a lump of scar tissue. And she just...ripped it all out."

He found himself unconsciously imitating her. Standing up, pulling his arm back, lifting it into the air. Ianto watched, sinking deeper into horror.

"Hundreds of years of agony and she tore it right out with one good pull," Jack said. "And then I woke up on her stone table down in the cold room and...and I had a brand new heart."

"Jack," Ianto said, weakly, covering his eyes with his hands.

"It was young, it was fresh, it had never been hurt." Jack could still feel the elation, the pure joy that had infused him the day he woke up with that first newborn heart. "I remembered it all, of course. But it didn't hurt any more. It was like being reborn."

Ianto finally dropped his hands. He had stopped crying. Jack looked into those blue eyes and had no idea what was going on.

"I felt young again," Jack said.

Saying it brought on a burst of crying so sudden and so abandoned that Jack's knees actually buckled.

Ianto caught him. They both sank to the floor, Ianto guiding him carefully until Jack's head ended up pillowed on one of Ianto's thighs. Ianto put a hand in his hair, stroking it.

"I felt young again," Jack said. "Every night a new death, every morning a new heart. And I knew, no matter what happened to it, that it wouldn't be with me long."

He lay still and felt Ianto's fingers stroke his head, slowly, rhythmically.

"Do you understand?" Jack said.

Ianto put his other arm around Jack's shoulders and hugged him tight.

"No," Ianto said. "I mean yes. I mean...I do and I don't."

Jack wrapped both arms around Ianto's waist, and buried his face in the folds of Ianto's trousers. The tears kept coming.

"Do you...do you...want her back?"

Jack hugged Ianto tighter.

"No," he said. "No, Ianto. I miss it. I do. But no. This heart I'm keeping."

He heard Ianto begin to cry again.

 _Because_ , Jack thought, though he couldn't bring himself to say it. _Because it's the one that's yours_.

END CHAPTER

 

 

 


End file.
